thee istsfor manity reader

Sour

Something in the magic of the sour blueberries and yogurt made the start of the day feel somewhat violet — or should I say blue. No. Go ahead and say blew. The day blew before it really got started. She, standing there, with a mouthful of bitterness the sun being smothered by the haze of factory smoke and wildfires. There was something more acrid than usual in the air, like a sweetness that cloyed at the edge of sludge, something sickly in the burning. The sharpness in her mouth brought her back to the moment she was inhabiting — a smudged pink sunrise beyond the billowing, and the nascent thought that something was dead and rotting just beyond the perimeter fence. She swallowed the bitterness with one gulp and let out a long exhalation. Instead of feeling lighter she was leaden and off to face whatever was out there waiting.

“there’s a harmonica tattooed on my collarbone
I can feel death’s mouth on it lips wiry & hot”

— Eduardo C. Corral / “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel”

Blockhead

Relevance was not his strong suit. Assonance was a mildly strong point. And dissonance was his power alley. So he detuned his lyre and randomly plucked strings. He tuned his dulcimer to F sharp and struck it with claw hammers which were more appropriate for sheet rock installation. He retrieved his banjo from a dusty corner in the basement and pulled on the strings hard enough to feel them loosen. He opened a can of stale tennis balls and threw them at the banjo head and strings. He then found his ukulele in the closet and tore out the E and C strings and went mad strumming at the speed of Johnny Ramone on the G and A strings. He even shouted, “gabba, gabba, hey” once for nostalgia sake. In the office he took his electric guitar off its stand, plugged it in, and maximized the fuzz box and with drumsticks he did a ratamacue on the fretboard until there was a maelstrom of skronk filling the room. After a minute of this, his heart racing and the incipient pangs of a migraine squeezing the sides of his neocortex, he raised the guitar over his head and smashed his acoustic guitar to splinters in its stand — and then started on the walls. In this manner his 3/2 with 2 car became a massive heap of refuse. He was proud to take out his home before the weather got the best of him. “Hurricane that! Fire that! Flood that! Tornado that! Glacier melt that! Sea level rise that! Earthquake that! Virus that! Gas explosion that! Take that! I’m in control, Mofo!

“He said the shadows of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us.”

— Ocean Vuong / “Immigrant Haibun”

Port of Call: Topeka, Kansas

X: You purport to a port of call called Topeka, Kansas. Does the Navy have a port of call in Topeka? The navy has a port in a landlocked city, good sir?

Z: What about the Kansas River?

X: Ocean faring ships, my good man!

Z: It’s the cereal of villainy, man. Electronic reminders coming in on radio waves and strange pings from deep space. And if they tell me there’s a port of call in Topeka, Kansas, that’s what I want to sign up for. Why the long face, sir?

X: Because you’re clearly a mad man, and we’re not the navy, and we don’t want madmen driving our cabs or interacting with our customers.

Z: Is it fair to deprive a fare of my enthusiasm?

X: We don’t call our customers fares. And please leave.

Z: Does a leaf leave in the fall? Does a leaf levy a reliquary in antiquary times — and pinion the fruit of piñon trees in the track of alarm? Pray tell.

X: Will you leave. Get out of this office now, or I’m calling the cops.

Z: Oh the cops! Always the clap trap of the mines. The sanctuary breakers and iconoclasts. May the remnants of saints never hear what you utter in gutter times of want and despair. You are a sanctimonious pontificator of flatulence, sir. Dark auguries hang from dead trees.

Good day to you, sir!

“The world has always been chaotic. Life is unpredictable…there is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends, even when…the middle is at the beginning, and the beginning is at the end.”

— Stephen Sondheim

Sacrilege

Sacrilege, I say. You say, poppycock. I say we go for ice cream on a pear tree, and the partridges be damned.

I have the eyeless in guaguanco player piano boll weevils in exploding plastic shades. I have a plastic covered couch and a handheld cassette player.

I have gutted all my visceral fish and lived a livestock week in panoply and cornucopia. I have called upon Mr. Pharmacist to make my life more bittersweet. He only succeeds at distant quasar sounds.

Oh please be here because I am and I don’t really want to go there where you’re not.

I have well trod ways of going off the rails. I have multifoliate multivariances and polyvalencies of texts. I have Brakhage films to screen and John Cage bubblegum to chew.

And thus I have chosen.

“As the jingle has it:

‘Brothers my first obligation
Is to tell you outright:
We’re in a tough situation
With no hope in sight’

Friends, a wholehearted admission
And a wholehearted UNLESS!”

— Bertolt Brecht / “The Truth Unites”

Wee Hour Verbiage

Chilly Black shoots similac intravenously in the wee hours. Wee Willie Winky wanders wavering and quavering in wastrel wigwams of wanton whimsy. Chuck Zuck plucks clucking ducks out of the muck. Wither Zither moves hither and thither.

Sangfroid in Pentaculous and I flow in the unyielding current, and I fill these spaces with these marks because I’ve committed to do this but right now I do not wish to do this, and this is what the result is…

“Imagine, when we call a strike and everyone refuses to work until we redistribute the wealth of the world.”

— Chuck Palahniuk / Fight Club

Goodly Bunkum

— That’s ungoodly bunkum, sir.

— Huh?

— Yes. That’s a good way of making no sense.

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”

— Ernest Hemingway

The Movement of Fear

I sleep on a patch of rocks where the library once stood. In the morning I walk back to my cell smelling of urine and fear. I love my little hole.

“Somewhere the world is beautiful, and outside it there is no salvation.”

— Albert Camus

Pinpricked

Some days are unforgiving, not offering succor in any way. Acedia seeping from every pore — feeling like the Sisyphean boulder is planted on your shoulders. You’re bent under the weight, but somehow you don’t break. You want it off, but it’s immovable. The best you can hope for is that it won’t crush you today. There’s no shaking this feeling. You pray for the end of the day to come before you go for the bottle and sink to the bottom. You remember getting sand blasted by the wind one day on a gray beach. A cold day pinpricked in your memory. Resignation at a sallow horizon where the sun could not break from its underwater hold. It seemed like ages in that cutting wind. Shearing. That is today. That may not be tomorrow. And that’s the best you can muster. There will be another attempt. Another day.

“You are a difficult case. But don’t give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.”

— George Orwell / 1984

Crown No. 14

I sat down brusquely on the dentist’s chair feeling I was about to get routed in some manner. Mint green all about the place. The trickling of water somewhere by my knees.

“Do you want the serial bicuspid?” he said, holding out what seemed to be a verdigris premolar.

“No, I want tooth number 14, for goodness sake,” I said.

“Do you have a nightclub act?” he said, and quickly came at my face with a syringe.

“Listen,” I said pulling at the bib on my chest popping it away from the clip. “I’ll be back. I have to go to the restroom and stare at my penis in the mirror for 23 seconds. And then I need to hear the cantering of calico ponies before I can submit to crown number 14.”

He said he would accompany me to the restroom and do the extraction while holding up my shirt, but he was by no means going to look at me, or any other part of my anatomy, but my mouth.

“It’s not about that,” I said. “This isn’t a sexual thing. But listen, why don’t you wear your surgical mask over your eyes while you extract my tooth? I’ll guide you by tapping out in Morse code where you are relative to tooth number 14.”

“I don’t know Morse code,” he said. He grabbed a handful of sharp implements from the tray and led me down the hall toward the restroom.

“All the better,” I said. “I don’t know Morse code either, but I’ll moan you through it. Maybe you’ll take out a couple of the wrong teeth, or maybe you’ll accidentally chip a few teeth. I’d like that.”

He stopped short by the fish tank. I could hear the hissing of the aerator. All the tropical fish were gone; only the aquarium snails were visible lined up on the inside glass in a formation that spelled “NO.”

“Do you realize that you’re the only patient that comes in to have his teeth ruined?” He took a handful of small blue rocks from the aquarium floor. “Blueberry bubble gum rocks,” he said, and popped them into his mouth.

“That’s me,” I said. “Eight shows a week, two on the weekends. I like to stand out from the crowd. Why do you think I wear these mesh tank tops given the awful shape I’m in — to show off my deltoids or pectorals?” I slapped at my gelatin chest.

“No. I want everyone to enjoy these rolls of fat.” I reached down and grabbed three spare tires muffined over my belt. “Ridge upon mighty ridge. I want to set my jiggle to glory!”

“You are quite unique in all the most unexpected ways,” he said. “Do you do a nightclub act? Do you know any Englebert?”

“Let’s go, doc! Put that mask over your eyes and let’s extract this sucker.”

“The traumatic event itself, however horrendous, had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I now saw that flashbacks could be even worse. You never know when you will be assaulted by them again and you have no way of telling when they will stop.”

— Bessel Van Der Kolk / The Body Keeps the Score

White Ash Is Falling From The Sky

white ash is falling from the sky…
white ash is falling from the sky…
white ash is falling from the sky…

“when the tide
retreats
we ask ourselves
why did it matter
so much
to have the last
word?
Or any word?”

— Joyce Carol Oates / “The Blessing”